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posted by mrpg on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the Ambulance-chasers-anonymous dept.

Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt has ordered an urgent review of Australia's biggest online doctor booking searching HealthEngine which has given hundreds of user's medical information to lawyers. This is how ambulance chasing works in the 21st century. No need to chase actual ambulances, just scan the medical records of people looking for clients. HealthEngine is partially owned by Telstra, which may explain this behaviour.

Prominent law firm Slater and Gordon confirmed that HealthEngine passed a list of potential clients to them on a daily basis averaging 200 per month which netted them at least $500,000 in legal fees. The app collects data such as whether or not the medical problem was a workplace injury making it easy to target potential clients for the lawyers to chase. The privacy policy for the app makes no mention of sharing the information with third parties for marketing purposes. While there is a collection notice, this information is not readily obvious to users many of whom are unaware that their private data is being sent on to other companies.

[...] HealthEngine and Slater and Gordon both declined interview requests and did not respond directly to questions.

HealthEngine said in a statement the company used advertising to "deliver relevant and timely information from our many different advertising partners to our users."


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:59PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:59PM (#708907)

    How about an optimist/pessimist version of the glass being half full, such that ridiculous over the top legal and privacy violation on an entire continent (OK, a ridiculously small island, but still technically a continent) still only net half a million bucks.

    That would imply either this is very street level and the real players who are protected are turning over billions, or the law is being so effectively enforced that small beans is all that occasionally happens?

    I was just kinda struck that at the white collar level people would risk so much for a mere half mil. Remember with the housing bubble in AUS, that's like a quarter of a "starter home". You'd think there would be easier criminal ways to earn a half mil.

    Could be an example of inadvertent control fraud where no one person knows everything thats going on such that the whole system is a crime, but every individual step appeared legal and normal. Or, often enough when talking about fraud type stuff, you end up with CEOs taking the blame, at least for PR purposes, for one engineer or one salesdroid ten layers below them in the hierarchy.

    Interesting thing to think about, there's no individual downside to what actually happened, merely a lot of "slippery slope" arguments about how bad something that could happen but didn't, could theoretically possibly be in a fictionalized sense. Usually courts don't like victimless crimes, although this is AUS and I don't know their legal system as well as ours. In Germany it seems "someone should do something about that before it becomes a problem" is the law of the land with speculative lawsuits but in the USA they generally don't roll with "theoretically in a tangentially related manner some unidentified future person might be harmed" or if you can do it its wrapped up in a lot of statistics like EPA/OSHA stuff.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:31PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @09:31PM (#709011)

    ridiculously small island

    ??? Australia is roughly the same size as the contiguous USA.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @04:20AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @04:20AM (#709797)

      He means Flinders Island?
      Or perhaps Tassie

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @07:02AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 20 2018, @07:02AM (#709827)

        ps. Do NOT google 'Map of Tasmania' while at work.